TIBCO Gets Streaming Boost with SnappyData Deal

George Leopold

Consolidation continues in the analytics software sector with a deal by TIBCO Software to acquire real-time analytics specialist SnappyData.

TIBCO said the acquisition would combine its business intelligence platform with SnappyData’s analytics data fabric, resulting in what the buyer said would be a 20-fold performance increase over native Apache Spark implementations while supporting Spark-compatible data stores.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

TIBCO, Palo Alto, Calif., said Thursday (March 7) the deal gives it a Spark-based in-memory cluster that would provide its current platform with a real-time capability. The combination would provide “live analytics on data in motion and at rest,” said Richard Lamb, co-founder and president of SnappyData.

SnappyData, Portland, Oregon, was spun out of Pivotal in 2015 to pursue platform development that combined the data manipulation capabilities of Apache Spark and Spark Streaming, the in-memory persistence of the GemFire’s data grid and an approximate query processing method that helps manage huge datasets so they can be readily queried.

The spinoff’s enterprise and open source platforms are aimed at Internet of Things and other use cases. The acquisition gives TIBCO capabilities that would boost its streaming and visual analytics capabilities along with data science and data operations such as orchestrating management of analytics data pipelines.

SnappyData’s platform combines Apache Spark, which excels at batch-oriented processing and in-memory OLAP processing, and GemFire, which is suited to high concurrency low-latency data management and OLTP. “You combine the two together, and it’s a single unified cluster that offers streaming analytics, OLTP and OLAP in a single cluster with both Spark and SQL programming models,” SnappyData’s CTO, Jags Ramnarayan, told Datanami in 2016.

TIBCO said the deal for SnappyData would fill out its current open source portfolio that also includes Project Flogo, a microservices development platform. The deal makes TIBCO fully compatible with the Apache Spark ecosystem, the company added, through SnappyData’s ability to fuse the Spark software stack with the Apache Geode distributed in-memory database.